


Crooked

by Shampain



Category: Constantine (Comic), Constantine (TV), Hellblazer, Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-04
Updated: 2014-12-04
Packaged: 2018-02-28 02:54:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2716277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shampain/pseuds/Shampain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You two ought to scamper off,” the hitchhiker was saying. He slipped his lighter back into the folds of his coat. He was very tall and frail looking in the moonlight, as if he could be easily snapped in half, but he had a beaten quality to him that was distinctly tough, like a rusty nail. They weren’t favorable comparisons. “I’ve got work to do, and you’re getting in the way.”</p>
<p>--</p>
<p>This is "vintage" SPN crossover fic, boys and girls, clocking in at almost 8 years of age. Read the author's note! <3</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crooked

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Enigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enigel/gifts).



> This is a fic I wrote a looooong time back. So if you read this, keep the timestamp in mind - about mid-Season 2 of Supernatural. The John Constantine featured is the one seen in the Hellblazer comic books, specifically the run that had him traveling through America, but since the new TV show (which I adore with burning love) is so spot-on, I've tagged the show on this fic as well, though it does NOT feature TV show canon in particular. Is that cheap? It is? Ah well.
> 
> It's written like a straightforward monster-of-the-week episode, which was the show's bread and butter until Season 3ish. This was for the now quiet Slashfest comm on Livejournal, and was a gift to the user who supplied the request. That is why this fic is a 'gift', even though it was given eight years ago and has already been read by the giftee! So if you're reading this right now, Enigel - hello! :)
> 
> I have not touched or edited this fic in any way, except maybe add a set of italics, hahaha. Basically what you see is what I wrote years ago, so it's not at my current level and I've no intention in tweaking it. Why am I putting it up now? Well, because it's a fun pairing, and with the Constantine show currently chugging along, I wanted to show my love, and there might be some random person out there who might want to read it (hi, random person!). Thus I went into the deep tunnels of my internet past, and dug up the dark and scary thing I found there. I realize that sounds a lot like the premise to a modern day fantasy curse, but there you have it. Enjoy. <3

They preferred the abandoned, derelict houses, with the sagging doors, the cobwebbed windows and corners, the creaking floorboards. It was easier; there was no one to lie to, no one to con, no one to really _deal_ with. There was just the house, and whatever dead thing was inside.

Dean went to pick the lock, but one touch of his hand and the door _crrrked_ open, the doorway revealing nothing beyond but a mass of dark, and emptiness. Sam’s flashlight cut right through the black, skittering up over floorboards, along torn lace and a crooked table leg, and glancing off the dusty frame of a watery colored portrait.

Dean moved to take a step forward; and just like that Sam’s arm thunked right into his chest, halting his tracks. The flashlight’s beam was wandering down again, settling on the floor.

“Footprints,” Dean said; they seemed to shine on the wooden floor, where they’d wiped the dust away. “Looks like someone’s got the same idea as us, Sammy.”

“Had, anyway,” Sam said. He skirted in. Dean hated it whenever Sam went first; the fraternal instinct to reach out, maybe grab Sam by the back of his sweater and yank him right out to safety, tended to flicker warningly whenever his younger brother took the lead. As always Dean tamped it down and stepped quietly inside, as quietly as possible in a pair of heavy black motorcycling boots. He held the muzzle of his shotgun down, but ready.

Sam was inspecting the portrait, holding his handgun firmly in one hand and the flashlight in the other, then turned away to peer down into what used to be a living room. The house seemed to fit its story - after all the deaths in the place no one had really wanted to buy it, and no one had scraped together the money to tear the place down yet.

Dean looked at the portrait Sam had abandoned. “Ca-reepy,” he remarked. It was a woman, her pale, glassy eyes staring out at him with a gravity that was usually only mastered by the dead. He looked up. Sam had disappeared into the living room, undoubtedly following the footprints.

“Sammy,” he said, and peered through the crooked doorway. Sam was standing over by another door, across the room. They’d been within long enough that the blackness of the house’s insides had gained form and shape, changing to furniture and carpets and cushions, and the pale light coming in through the windows offered as much illumination as could be had. In the dim light Sam’s face was frowning. And it wasn’t the usual frown either.

“What?” Dean asked, stepping into the room, and Sam half-turned and held up a hand. Listen.

Dean heard nothing, except maybe the rush of a car swiping past outside. Maybe Sam was just overreacting. But the more Dean stood still, the more the back of his neck started to prickle, and his hunting instincts, ingrained into him since he was a boy, were insisting otherwise.

And he heard it - a long, groaning creak, and a tap, like someone rapping their knuckles on a doorframe. Dean slowly turned on his heel, hefting up his shotgun. Someone was walking down a flight of stairs now, Dean could tell by the sounds. Suddenly Sam was at his shoulder, and flicked off his flashlight.

“Sounds human,” he said under his breath.

“Yeah, well,” Dean said, “they like to sound human, so they can trick the ones that don’t know any better.”

Sam moved forward but Dean wouldn’t allow it, slipping in front of his brother to sneak a glance around the doorway, into the hall they’d entered by. The sounds had stopped now. They waited.

And suddenly Dean whipped around, swinging the shotgun in a great arc, and Sam darted out of the way, startled, and Dean leveled his weapon at the man who had come in from behind, from the doorway Sam had previously been standing in. He was wearing a long coat, and even in the dark his haggard disarray and rampant blonde hair was obvious.

“Buggering-!” the hitchhiker exclaimed. “You and your bloody guns.”

 

\---

 

Sam was driving, which was why they stopped.

Dean? Dean hated hitchhikers. Or rather, he was suspicious of them. He felt he was entitled to a steady dose of paranoia, after all, and he’d seen enough of those damn movies to cement it. But Sam was driving, Sam of the bleeding-heart, let’s-talk-about-feelings variety, which was why, as Dean woke from his doze, the car slowed to a gradual stop at the roadside.

If it was in the middle of the night, maybe Sam would have just driven by - it depended, really, on the amount of coffee he’d been drinking, if there was any mysterious fog, and if sympathy overrode suspicion. But really it was the middle of the day, and Dean was napping because Sam had insisted on an early start while Dean had insisted on a late night, and Sam could therefore do as he pleased.

“Wait, wait,” Dean said, struggling to wakefulness, forcing himself to sit up a little straighter. “What are you doing?”

The back door opened and shut, and there was the sudden smell of Jack Daniels and cigarettes. “Cheers,” a smoker’s voice said, in a thick English accent.

“Where are you going?” Sam asked, unperturbed.

There was a pause. “South,” the voice said, finally. “Not sure how far, come to think it.”

Dean cracked his neck and shot Sam a look before turning to give the new passenger a once-over. The man was older than both of them, and travel worn, blonde and unshaven. Despite the scent of Jack Daniels the man didn’t look drunk; rather he seemed particularly uncaring and indifferent. There was something very familiar about the curve of his mouth and the glint of his eyes, but Dean wasn’t one for staring. It wasn’t cool, after all.

“We’ll take you as far as we’re going, then,” Sam said mildly, putting the car into gear. Dean sat up straight and fought away his drowsiness, rubbing the corners of his eyes. He was steadfastly refusing to talk, but he shot Sam another dirty look. Sam had that vile little smile playing around his mouth, which went right back to when they were just kids and Sam was the younger, spoilt one. Hardy-fucking-harr, Dean thought moodily to himself.

“’Preciate it,” said the hitchhiker. “Not much traffic, these parts.”

“What, you been walking?” Dean asked, breaking his decision to be silent without even thinking about it, looking over his shoulder again. The passenger glanced away from where he’d been staring at Sam and grinned a wily grin, raising one shoulder in a shrug.

They let him off once they hit town, and went to check in to a motel.

 

\---

 

He wasn’t ridiculously brave, but he wasn’t that scared either. He was wary and cautious and, Dean decided, possessed of the air of a man who expected to have guns pointed at him on a daily basis.

“I’ve noticed that about America,” said the hitchhiker. “You all use guns to solve your problems. What happened to good old diplomacy?”

“What’re you doing here?” Dean asked, refusing to lower the shotgun. The Englishman kept his attention on the barrel, glancing up at Dean every so often. He could maybe jump out of the way if Dean pulled the trigger, maybe dodge the spray. Maybe. Not that it would kill him - it was full of rock salt, but the man didn’t know that.

“I thought it was obvious,” the hitchhiker said. “I was trying to give you two fellows a scare. Worked, dint?”

Dean grimaced inwardly at the barb. Shotgun or not, he’d still been surprised despite his wariness, and that was just annoying.

“You should probably go,” Sam said to the hitchhiker, jumping right into the bullshit. “There’s been a dangerous animal wandering around the grounds, we’re here to get rid of it.”

“Weak,” said the man.

“Okay,” Sam said, “You should probably go before my brother pulls the trigger.”

The man’s mouth twisted. He took a step back. Dean saw it then, but ‘see’ was a bad word - rather its presence became known, because it seemed to be blocking what he should have been seeing, like sections of the wall or doorframe, out of his vision. He opened his mouth to shout for the man to get out of the way.

But the man twisted and threw himself aside with a flap of his olive trench coat without needing to be warned, and Dean fired a round of rock salt into the spirit. It kept on coming.

Sam leveled up his handgun and fired three times to no avail. The gun was knocked from his hand and sent spinning out a window, breaking through the old, fragile glass, and he was pushed back so hard that he toppled through the doorway, back into the entrance hall, managing to earn the spirit’s special attention, Dean figured, just by pissing it off.

“Up, up!” Dean started shouting.

All three of them scrambled to their feet and ran.

 

\---

 

They were outside. “I don’t know about you, Sam,” Dean grumbled. “But I’m getting tired of walking into these places with guns that don’t work on the bastards.”

The Englishman was lighting up a cigarette and taking a draw with obvious enjoyment. Sam wasn’t paying attention to Dean, and it only took him a moment to understand why. Most people didn’t react very well to spirits or the paranormal, not when they’d seen them for the first time, and most of them didn’t calmly light up during the coping process.

“You two ought to scamper off,” the hitchhiker was saying. He slipped his lighter back into the folds of his coat. He was very tall and frail looking in the moonlight, as if he could be easily snapped in half, but he had a beaten quality to him that was distinctly tough, like a rusty nail. They weren’t favorable comparisons. “I’ve got work to do, and you’re getting in the way.”

Of course, that just made Dean bristle - that was his way, and he accepted it. One of the surefire ways to get Dean to do something was to absolutely forbid him to, as most people learned early on. But Sam, universal voice of reason, said, “Come on, then, Dean.” Behind them, in the house, they heard nothing. It was deceptively quiet, the windows empty.

“Looks like another hunter,” Sam said, as they traipsed their way back to their car, “not just a snoop. Unless he’s reporter.”

“Come on, Sam,” Dean replied. “You saw him. He probably weighs less than you, and let’s face it, you’re no fine specimen of the male species,” he paused, and added, “like me.”

Sam ignored him. “Better not to get in his way,” he said. “He doesn’t seem the type to take help.”

“Whatever,” Dean said, carefully controlling his emotions before he accidentally slammed the door of his beloved Impala. “This is our case.”

“It’s not like we staked a claim on it, Dean,” Sam said crossly, and then looked thoughtful. “Actually that might be a good idea.”

“What?” Sometimes Sam’s mind moved forward in weird ways, and it always left Dean behind.

“You know,” Sam said, suddenly looking energized. “Maybe we could set up some sort of database for hunters to report jobs, and to stake claims. I’m not sure it would work, though. How many of them do you think use computers? And I guess the last thing hunters want is to broadcast their moves, now that I think on it. No, I guess it’s not a good idea at all.” And just like that, the idea fizzled off. Sam’s ideas either stuck or died before they could come into fruition, which was a blessing half the time. The other half of the time it definitely wasn’t.

Dean was hoping that Sam had suitably distracted himself from the conversation, but no go. “Anyway,” his little brother said, “you’re just being stubborn.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re always stubborn.”

“Yeah, but besides that.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sam said, “you’ve got that thing where you have to prove your superiority any chance you get.”

“I do not,” Dean protested.

“Dean,” Sam said, “just this morning you _had_ to prove you can jump higher than me.”

“Well I _can_.”

“Let’s just leave this hunt to that other guy,” Sam said, “or maybe keep an eye on it if he doesn’t pull through and we can help him out,” he added, because Dean got that I-didn’t-just-spend-fifty-dollars-of-gas-to-get-here-for-nothing look on his face.

“Fine,” Dean said, with no intention of doing any such thing (though he probably would, in the end).

After a moment Sam said, “And you need to turn here.”

“Shut up, I know.”

 

\---

 

Sam had tapped away at his computer’s keyboard as soon as they caught wind of the case. That’s what Sam did. Personally Dean didn’t find much use for computers. He didn’t even really like the porn, because as far as he was concerned you had to _pay_ for good pornography, and he didn’t trust those amateur sites. Sam, though, could do wonders with his laptop, research-wise, and Dean put it down to those years of secondary learning. At least Sam had gotten something from all those boring years of assignments and fiddly essays and grades that had no bearing whatsoever in the real world.

Sam had found two articles relating to the house in question. He had gotten there from five articles relating to sudden deaths in the area (which is what had initially drawn their interest) that were close to the house, and when Sam discovered there was a disused property about he went and looked that up as well. Before, Dean had just gone around asking questions, but with Sam around there was less awkward pauses, less formulating, and less flashing of fake IDs. But only less.

The two articles on the house, from different papers, were about the same story. In the first one the deaths of the entire family were well-documented; the various members had been found in either odd or self-inflicted deaths, all save for the baby, who had been smothered. In the second article the events were loudly proclaimed to be the work of a suicidal cult. Police had gone over the area numerous times, and the place was clean. No fingerprints. No foul play.

Sam was in the shower when Dean hollered through the bathroom door that he was going to the bar. “You’re not driving!” Sam hollered right back. Dean rolled his eyes. He left the keys to his car and the keys to the room on the dresser, shrugged on his jacket, and went outside.

Dean liked walking by himself. Especially at night, when the air was colder, clearer. Dean shoved his hands into his pockets. Nothing to fear but muggers. What a relief.

Dean shouldered his way through the door of the bar he’d glimpsed on the corner as they’d driven in to the motel. If Dean liked walks, he loved bars. He could always find a way to fit in, and to a misfit like himself that was always a boost. Besides, there were always the girls, at least two good ones by his reckoning, even in the shitty bars.

He bumped right into one not long after he entered the building; she giggled, and grabbed his shoulders for balance. “What can I get you?” she asked, flirtatiously, her nametag prominently displayed on her prominent chest. “Just a beer,” he told her over the music, and gave her one of his crooked smiles. Girls loved Sam because he was sweet and unassuming, but Dean’s smiles made them go crazy.

He half-turned and saw, to his unpleasant surprise, a familiar rail-thin figure surrounded by wafts of smoke. Three times in one day. Bad luck.

“What, you stalking me?” Dean asked, walking over to stand by the table. The blonde Englishman reclined back in his seat and stretched out a leg, haphazardly kicking the nearest empty chair away from his table, providing enough room to sit.

“Could ask you the same thing,” he said lazily. “Here, have a seat. Or don’t. All the same to me.”

Dean took the offered chair. “So how’d your little scouting job go?” he asked breezily. The girl showed up with his beer, and he plucked a couple of bills from his wallet. “One for my friend as well,” he said. The other man winked rakishly at her.

“’Scuse my manners,” he said, sitting up and reaching out, no doubt forced to introduce himself now that Dean had bought him a drink. “John Constantine.”

“Like the emperor?”

“S’right.”

Dean shook the other man’s hand. “Dean Winchester.”

“Like the rifle.”

“’Course.”

“That makes sense then,” said John. “You waving that silly shotgun in my face before shooting at the bitch behind me. Bullets can’t hurt it.”

“It was rock salt,” Dean said, taking a drink of his beer. “And what did you propose to do? Kill it with secondhand smoke?”

John chuckled. The familiarity of the other man struck Dean very suddenly, and he knew why; Constantine had the same thing about him that Dean saw when he looked in the mirror. A rakishness, a sex appeal. When the waitress returned with more beers she seemed undecided as to where her true attention should lie - at the rugged youth in motorcycle boots, or the accented older man with the experience etched into every detail. Eventually she went for Dean, because he was the one that was paying.

“So, John,” Dean said, scraping his thumbnail against the label on his bottle. “What brings you over here? Last I checked England was pretty far away.”

John stubbed out his cigarette and lit up another one. “Knew a girl once, back when I was a punk,” he said. “Knew lots of girls, actually. One of them moved out here, she hung herself two weeks back. Thought I should pay my respects.”

“Oh,” Dean said, “Yeah, I heard about that. On a dog leash.”

“She loved dogs,” John said, “Irony, irony. What brings you here, then?”

“It’s a hobby,” Dean said dismissively. John’s mouth twisted into a smirk.

“Yeah?” he asked.

Dean wasn’t about to defend himself and start blabbing because that just wasn’t done, but he was in no mood to be scorned. He had a feeling that how good he was wouldn’t matter anyway; it was experience that would rate well with Constantine. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years,” he said, “I know my way around this country.”

Dean was right, because John looked slightly mollified. “I won’t claim to know this country, that’s certain,” he said. “Always out of my element here, whenever I chance to visit. I belong in bonnie old England, where it always rains.”

“So,” Dean said. He’d learned his lesson to be wary of other hunters, and not to be chummy or attached to them in case they turned out to be psychotic, career-obsessed murderers, but he wasn’t above doing a little digging. The place was loud enough for their conversation to go virtually unnoticed, anyway. Another good thing about bars. Could they do any wrong? “What’s your theory on that house?”

John was finishing off the beer Dean had bought him. “No theory,” he said. “Already know.”

“Yeah?”

“Not going to tell you, of course,” John said easily. “S’not my way, not really anyone’s way. Am I right?”

Dean just looked at the other man, raising his eyebrows, and then nodded. He reached out and hooked his hand around the passing waitress’s elbow. “Another round for me and my friend, please,” he said, motioning to himself and John. Dean knew how it worked.

 

\---

 

He remembered only later, as he was tugging at the doorknob, that he didn’t have the key to the room. He settled for slamming the heel of his palm against the door with its flaking red paint, producing an unpleasant whacking sound. “Sam!” He started wailing, after what he deemed was many minutes of knocking (though was, in all likelihood, just many seconds, or maybe less). “Saaaaam!”

The door was opened and Dean almost toppled forward. “Dean,” Sam said. “You’re going to wake the other guests up.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, putting his shoulder to the doorframe to push himself back up in a standing position. “Sorry about that.”

“Come on,” Sam said with marked impatience, grabbing his brother’s elbow and tugging him inside. “Do you know what time it is?”

“No,” Dean said.

‘No,” Sam said. “Of course you don’t.” He helped Dean over to the bed closest to the door, depositing his older sibling down onto the unsteady mattress.

“So hey,” Dean was saying, struggling out of his jacket, which was harder than it usually was. “It’s not a spirit, it’s a fingerprint.”

Sam paused on his way to the bathroom, holding a glass. “What?”

“ _You_ know.”

“You’re not making any sense Dean,” Sam said, disappearing into the bathroom. He reappeared with a glass full of water. Dean managed not to slop it all over himself.

“The _thing_ in the _house_ ,” he insisted. “Come on, you wen’ to _college_ , you should be _smart_.”

Sam put his hands to Dean’s face, forcing him to look straight ahead. “Okay, Dean,” Sam said. “Think very clearly. Speak clearly. What about the house?”

“It’s not a spirit,” Dean said blandly. “It’s more like a fingerprint. I mean imprint. A mental one. That’s what John told me.”

“Who’s John?”

Dean gave Sam a very cross look. “Bah,” he said. “I’m tired of you.” He pushed Sam away, thrust the empty glass at the other, and flopped down on the bed. Sam sighed.

 

\---

 

The story went like this:

Rich children are normally spoilt and overindulged. There was one girl who was very used to getting what she wanted. When she found herself wronged in a horrible, unimaginable manner, she struck out without even meaning to. “Like in _Carrie_ ,” Dean had slurred. “Exactly, exactly!” John had replied enthusiastically. “Just like _Carrie_.”

Dean had never liked _Carrie_. Fucking weird movie, in his opinion. How, how on _earth_ , can someone find pig’s blood to be funny? Maybe high school really was that bad. Dean had never stuck around long enough to find out.

He had a horrible headache the next morning. He took aspirin and drank a lot of coffee, and tried not to turn green when Sam showed up eating a greasy egg sandwich with evident enjoyment.

“So you’re saying that this girl murdered her entire family?” Sam said. “Over what?”

“Who knows,” Dean said, “maybe she didn’t get her pony when she asked for it.”

“And you got this from that other hunter?”

“Yuhp.”

“Why would he tell you?”

“Because,” Dean said. “He’s foreign, he doesn’t know the place, he decided he needed help. I think we agreed to burn the house down. That _usually_ works.”

Sam rubbed at his temples. Dean could tell he wasn’t pleased, but then again, Dean couldn’t really care. Sam didn’t trust this source of information and neither did Dean really, but Dean was more interested in setting something on fire to really bother himself with it. Besides, he had a feeling John was right. “Come on,” Dean said. “You looked up the history of the house, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “And while you were out drinking I did a little more research.”

“ _Great_ ,” Dean said. “Do tell. Does it fit?”

“Well, there was a well-off family living there a couple decades back,” Sam said, sounding touchy. “And the house had no history of murder or disaster before it. Actually, no death inside the walls since that family died. Just deaths outside of it.”

“Well that makes sense,” Dean said. “Nobody’s gone in there for ages, anyway.”

“Not only that, but the victims have no relation to the family, but I dug up a little on them and two of them were distantly related to each other, _and_ ,” Sam added, “all the other deaths occurred within the old property line, but not outside of it. So whatever it is, it’s stuck inside.”

Dean nodded. “So we smoke the house?”

“Guess so.”

“What about the property line, will that matter?”

“Dunno. We’ll have to see.” Sam popped the last bit of his sandwich in his mouth. He looked at Dean closely. “You sure you don’t want breakfast?”

“I’m sure.”

“Because you really should start your day with a full stomach,” Sam said robotically in a breakfast-is-the-most-important-meal-of-the-day tone. “Actually, I hear seafood is pretty good for you, earlier in the day. Like squid. How about some _raw squid_ , Dean?”

Dean jerkily reached out to tug at the handle and open the car door, stumbling out onto the hot pavement of the parking lot and feeling himself gag. It would be best to spend a few moments breathing fresh air, away from his brother. He could hear Sam snicker behind him. What a bitch.

 

\---

 

They had to do it at night, because setting a fire in the middle of the day garnered unwanted attention. Or, at least more attention than necessary. The last thing they wanted was for someone to call the fire department and have the firemen show up in time to douse the flame and save the house. Like in The Grudge, Dean thought. God, what a stupid movie. Those Japanese stories never made any sense.

John was waiting for them, in front of the house, just outside the property line. He was cast half in shadow when Dean and Sam drove up and parked at the side of the road. It was an old place, surrounded by trees. The houses here had large properties and at least five minutes walking distance to the nearest neighbour, offering lots of space for unseen activities, and lots of shade.

“Evening,” John said, not looking much worse than he had yesterday. Dean decided that was probably his look. ‘There goes John Constantine,’ other people would say, ‘in his olive trench coat and those cigarettes, looking like he was just dragged out of a gutter.’

“My brother says you talked to him last night,” Sam said, climbing out of the car and shutting the door matter-of-factly.

“That I did,” John said. “Hell of a drinker, your brother. Likes to talk. Know what he said about you?”

“No,” Sam said. “What?”

“Lots of things,” John replied smarmily. “Did you bring the gas?”

“Yehp,” Dean said, popping the trunk. “A bunch. Never know when you’re gonna need gasoline.”

“Got any salt?”

Dean looked up, frowning at the sudden question. “Why?”

John searched his jacket and pulled out a couple plastic bottles of the Gatorade variety. “Water,” he said mildly, “blessed by a white witch. Better with salt.”

“You’re going to sprinkle that around the property line.” Sam stated.

“Got a better idea?” John asked, raising his eyebrows at Sam. For a moment Dean wondered if they were about to embark in a staring contest, but that wasn’t Sam’s style; he only did that if he was trying to get something personal out of Dean.

Dean took out a couple cases of gas and closed the trunk. Sam shook his head. John’s idea was a good one, after all. “Right,” Dean said, handing the extra gasoline to John. “Let’s go.”

It promised to be a straightforward affair. Dean hoped it would be. He hefted up his case of gasoline and shouldered his shotgun which would, if anything, be a deterrent and nothing more - at the least it made him feel better. Or if John made any more smart remarks, he just might shoot him. The more Dean stood around Constantine, the more he itched to do something violent.

“Who’s going first?” John asked. Not him, obviously.

Sam wordlessly stepped forward, onto the brittle grass of the lawn, and they set off towards the house. Everything was lit by the moon - that’s what Dean liked about not being in a big city. You could always see the stars and moon, and they could actually provide illumination.

Sam opened the front door and slid inside. It was the same as before and in the state they had left it, with their footprints crossing every which way. The portrait on the table in the entrance hall was still there. Dean figured by now that it was probably the mother. Disappointing mothers all tended to pose for photographs in the same way.

“Split up then?” John asked, rhetorically. He had an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear, which he would no doubt light when the house was properly on fire. Sam nodded and Dean turned on his heel, heading to the living room; Sam and John took the stairs.

Dean glanced all around him and then, in slow, careful motions, began to slosh the gasoline along the floor. The smell was almost comforting. He and Sam had gone over this. The bodies of the family had been cremated; it had to be the house and grounds that were truly evil, and which had to be destroyed, or at least cleansed by fire. And if Constantine was right then a mental imprint had nothing to do with the body anyway - corpses were irrelevant.

The thought of what Constantine had said led to other events, which made Dean feel angry and shifty and awkward. He glanced around, as if he was being watched and his uncomfortable manner being noted. But there was, of course, nothing to see.

He trailed through the kitchen, into the dining room, where he straightened up and looked around, a little creeped out by the fact that nothing was happening yet, and that nothing was trying to stop him. He felt a little seed of worry take form in his mind. That’s when he noticed the mantel place, decorated by framed pictures, some propped up and others toppled face-first.

It was pure curiosity that drove Dean to look in at the photos. He always tended to do that - and, well, it usually served him, too, on those times where he pawed through dusty documents and worn out books that led him to stumble upon something rather useful to the entire enterprise. He blew a little dust from the glass of one, catching the blurred faces of a family portrait. The young, round-faced girl to the right must be Emilie, the one that killed her family. She wasn’t really a looker, Dean decided. A little too much in appearance like an owl.

He was about to turn away when he saw another photo, one of two people sitting together. He frowned, turning back, and plucked it off the shelf, wiping the dust away from the frame with his sleeve. He almost dropped the picture in surprise.

It was Emilie in the arms of a loving suitor, their embrace fond but guarded. It wasn’t Emilie’s smile but the face of her beau that caught his attention, a face that looked, startlingly, like the face of his very own brother. Dean stared at it. That’s when he heard the crash upstairs.

 

\---

 

Dean stormed up the stairs, shotgun at the ready, shining his flashlight into the darkness. “Sammy!” he was hollering, frantically, turning a corner at the landing and facing down a long hall. Gasoline was everywhere. “Sam!” he called again, starting to panic.

He rounded another corner at hearing a shout, and swatted open a half-closed door. That’s when he found Sam on his back, apparently being strangled; by what, he couldn’t see, but he was damn certain what it probably was.

The crashing was coming from Sam kicking violently at a broken wardrobe.

The shotgun was useless and besides that he didn’t want to hit Sam with the spray. He dropped it and leapt forward, grasping his brother by the shoulder of his sweater, in one great tug hauling Sam half to his feet and towards the door. Dean felt what was an uncomfortable pressure around his chest, like he was being squeezed; when he thrust his hand out he felt it meeting resistance, as if he was being attacked by an invisible someone who wasn’t quite all there.

The two of them stumbled out into the hall, and Dean grabbed his lighter from his pocket. Shame, really, it was his favourite lighter. He flicked it as he dragged Sam down the corridor, tossing it behind him, hearing the satisfying clunk and whoosh as the lighter flame hit the gasoline-soaked floorboards.

They almost fell down the stairs. Sam was breathing again now, barely, forcing in air through a constricted throat. Dean had to get Sam off the land.

“Come on Sammy,” Dean said under his breath. He shoved his brother unceremoniously through the front door, turning on his heel to fumble in his jacket for matches. He could feel it coming down the stairs but he ignored it, striking a match until it flamed to life. “Hell hath no fury,” he muttered, and threw the match into the living room, where the couch caught fire.

He almost took a tumble out the door as he ran and bent to scoop up Sam. They sprinted headlong across the yard, not stopping until they’d reached the car.

Sam leaned against the vehicle, panting, trying to catch his breath. “You okay?” Dean asked, and his brother nodded. That was good enough. They stood and watched the house hiss and burn. Where was John?

Dean was just about to ask that question aloud when he saw the unmistakable figure of the older man approach them from the right, disentangling himself from a clump of trees, sprinkling salted water as he went. “He left you,” Dean said dully.

“I told him to,” Sam said, faintly, before moving to tug open the passenger door and climbing in. Dean stayed outside, watching John approach.

“Aha,” John said, emptying what was undoubtedly his last bottle just as he reached the car. “Once again I excel at the task of distribution.”

Dean had left his shotgun inside, which meant he didn’t have anything to shoot John with. He stalked over a few feet to stand face to face with the blonde, accusingly. “You bastard,” he said.

John gave Dean a careful look. “You’re easily led,” he said, “but you’re not stupid.”

Dean stared levelly at John while, in the background, the house crackled and collapsed. They should probably leave soon, before police showed up. “I don’t care how you did it,” Dean said, “but you convinced Sam to leave him alone, and you knew about his resemblance, didn’t you?” and he thrust the photograph towards John, accusingly.

John shrugged. “I noticed when he stopped the car to let me hitch a ride,” he said. “It was common sense. The girl wouldn’t attack when she was dealing with a look-alike of her lover. Gave us time.”

Dean didn’t need it spelt out for him. Everything clicked into place - the girl’s rage, the photograph, and he was certain with research the victims would become clear too. John’s easy manipulation of Dean had him burning from stung pride at being so easily pushed off track, at allowing himself to be distracted. But mostly Dean was in a fury that he’d left Sam alone with an immoral exorcist from England who he didn’t know and therefore should never have trusted, ever, because Dean should have known better.

Dean didn’t have a gun, but he had a fist. He punched Constantine in the face, cracking a blow sharply across his jaw. He’d punched John across the face again, and then in the stomach, by the time Sam was clambering back out of the car, saying something sharply, telling his brother to stop.

Dean ignored him, and, in a motion that was more of a blow to pride than anything else, dealt the Englishman a smack on the face with his open palm. John had fallen to his knees by then, and spat a mouthful of blood on the ground.

“Never was much of a fighter,” he said gruffly. He seemed to have expected the beating. Dean was prepared to do much, much worse, but he held back.

“Stay away from my brother,” he said softly, leaning down over John. “You hear me?”

John had the expression of a man working his tongue along his teeth, to see if anything was loose or falling out, then smiled a bloody smile. “No hard feelings, Winchester,” he said hoarsely. “I told you, the girl that died was a friend of mine. Was merely looking out for my best interests. Besides, if you’d kept more of a level head about you, I never would have been able to use your brother as bait.”

Dean felt like kicking the other in the face, but instead he turned on his heel. “Back in the car, Sam,” he said shortly, digging into his jacket for the keys, and Sam actually obeyed him. He started up the car and pulled away from the side of the road, watching in his rear-view mirror as John unsteadily got back to his feet.

 

\---

 

“So it turns out two of the victims that weren’t part of Emilie’s family were related to a man named Richard Graham, and he was supposed to marry her,” Sam told Dean while Dean consumed a bag of chips in lieu of a breakfast. “Only he was cheating on her with numerous women. She lashed out with telekinesis by accident, killed her own family, and then killed herself. Only she was so angry part of her remained behind and she haunted the grounds.”

“So what about the other victims?” Dean asked, not that he was really interested. “The ones that weren’t related to Graham?”

“They were related to the women he was sleeping with behind Emilie’s back,” Sam said. “If they accidentally stepped foot on the grounds she forced them to kill themselves, or just killed them in ways that looked self inflicted. I’m not sure how. Don’t particularly care.” Sam was morose for a moment. Probably thinking about Max.

“So she went after you because you looked like this Richard guy,” Dean said moodily, still unable to get over the fact that he’d been an idiot. “Both times.” Usually it was okay, but there were mistakes he couldn’t afford to make if his brother was involved. He’d done it once before, when they were kids; now he’d done it again. Could Dean ever get anything right?

Sam was unaware of Dean’s discomfort and guilt, because he didn’t know. No, Sam was busy texting one of his old school buddies. Sam didn’t know, Sam wouldn’t find out. Dean didn’t want to hide it, but he had to. That was just the way it had to be. Sam was his comfort, his little brother, the baby he’d carried out of a burning house, and also the man he’d helped out of a burning house just the other night. Life was stupid like that. Dean smiled hollowly a little, crumpled the emptied chip bag into a ball, and matter-of-factly lobbed it at Sam’s head.

 

\---

 

Dean can’t put into words what happened, because it was strange and unlike him. That’s what he likes to think, anyway. He was right about John Constantine and the man’s engaging nature, his sex appeal. The more they drank and laughed, the more Dean felt… he wasn’t, isn’t sure of the word. But it was something that expressed a general looseness, an ease.

John told him a lot of things, so much so that Dean felt as if John was telling him everything. About his sister back home, one of his many girlfriends, his interest in the occult since a boy - a self made hunter, just like his father, only there was less hunting and more like general tomfoolery where Constantine was concerned. That’s because, John said, he wasn’t a Marine like Dean’s dad but a grown-up, washed-up punk that hadn’t worked an honest job in his life. Somewhere in there they agreed to meet at the house the next night, to settle everything, John drunkenly confiding how glad he was to run into some proper help in this damn country.

After they’d felt they’d drank enough - they’d done shots for awhile, competitively at first, before giving up and calling it a draw - they’d fumbled their way outside to walk back to their respective motels. That’s when John grabbed Dean by his jacket and pulled him off into the alley, their boots crunching over broken glass, and John smelling thickly, tasting strongly, of cigarette smoke.

Dean didn’t kiss men often, not if he could help it. He kissed girls - their mouths were soft, and warm, and sweet, and he loved them as much as he loved their other bits. But kissing John was rough and surprisingly fulfilling, and he was too drunk to push the older man away.

He fell back against the cracked brick of the wall. The alley stank of garbage and piss, but it didn’t bother him. Dean gripped onto John’s coat for support, his mouth pressed awkwardly to the other man’s, sometimes missing entirely, his lips scraping along the stubble of Constantine’s jaw. John was enjoying himself, murmuring under his breath, hands moving, exploring Dean’s chest and stomach and lower back, sneaking beneath the jacket and feeling the curves of Dean’s muscles through his thin t-shirt.

A couple times their hips ground suggestively, and that’s when Dean’s mind started to wake up. He found himself tangled with an older man in an alley - a haggard, unshaven man whose presence made Dean feel tense and uncertain and wanting. John nipped at Dean’s lower lip in the same way Dean nipped the lips of countless flushed girls.

John seemed to sense Dean’s hesitation, and he pulled away, but not before running his hand down Dean’s side, nails scratching lightly through the worn shirt. Dean shivered. “I should go,” he mumbled, and shouldered his way past.

“Tomorrow,” John said, in a reminder.

Dean held his hand up and made the universal a-okay signal with his thumb and forefinger without looking back, staggering back to the street, to the sidewalk. He needed to find a girl, now. He needed to reassert himself.

But he did not want to go back into the bar, and no girl loitering at the door could be found. He walked through the night, losing his balance every so often. He stopped in the parking lot outside his motel, standing there, shivering in the night air. He felt cold, and alone, and dumbfounded, and drunk. There was no girl to purge the taste of ash from his mouth, no more alcohol to dim his memory. Sam would help, he decided. He got up off his knees (when had he knelt down, and why? Probably to throw up, but he was quite sure he hadn’t). He tried very hard to forget, and as a result couldn’t think about anything else, couldn’t occupy his mind with anything worth knowing. He made his way back to his room where, he was sure, Sam would make everything better by distracting him from everything that was wrong.

The next time Dean sees John Constantine, he’ll kill him.

Actually, probably not, because Dean is not the killing-in-cold-blood type. But he would like to and that, in itself, he finds comforting enough.

 


End file.
